Re: Problem with ALTER TABLE - occasional "tuple concurrently updated"

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 8:57 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Jon Nelson <jnelson+pgsql(at)jamponi(dot)net> wrote:
>> I have a process which runs in parallel creating tables which, as the
>> /final/ step in the import, gets SQL much like the following applied:
>>
>> ALTER TABLE foo INHERIT bar;
>>
>> Periodically, I get this error:  tuple concurrently updated
>>
>> Of course, I googled for the error message and see a bunch of issues
>> involving ANALYZE and even DROP function.
>> Is this the same root cause? Is there a fix? Is there a lock I could
>> take or some other approach that would prevent the error?
>> I thought all ALTER TABLE statements took a big fat lock to prevent
>> such an issue.
>
> The ALTER TABLE generates that error?  Is it running concurrently with
> any other DML?  What version of PostgreSQL is this?

Yes, sometimes yes, and 8.4.5.

> That does sound like a bug.

That's what I thought!

--
Jon